About Feed Me A Story

By answering questions like “what is your favorite childhood food?”, “What was the first recipe you learned to cook?” “What food is important to your cultural experience?” the project extends the concept of what it means to be an American, and incorporates the quintessential American road trip with cultural history and contemporary influences.

Feed Me A Story

Feed Me A Story is a collective created by Theresa Loong and Laura Nova that works on intergenerational projects focusing on the elderly and other communities that are underserved and overlooked by mainstream media. We are inspired by two of the oldest interactive experiences – eating and talking. The team has partnered with several arts and cultural institutions in New York City, launching events at the Ellis Island National Historic Site, Governors Island LMCC Swing Space, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Chinese in America, the Museum at Eldridge Street, Children’s Museum of the Arts and as SPARC artists with the LaGuardia Senior Center. Feed Me a Story received funding from the New York State Council for the Arts, the National Endowment of the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Department of Cultural Affairs. PBS/POV selected Feed Me a Story to participate in two hackathons to develop our app. We performed at LMCC’s Lent Space, the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival and the Asian American Arts Alliance’s Locating the Sacred Arts Festival. Artist Alliance Inc offered us the opportunity occupy a empty Essex Street Market stall for nearly a year to present a market story series. Currently, we are working on a memory collection app that facilitates the sharing of of food stories from a re-vamped airline refreshment cart equipped with an iPad and video camera. As public performance artists, we collect stories playing the role of cultural flight attendants. The aesthetics of culinary art, in its preparation and its presentation, manifests itself as we wear our uniforms and customize our cart and its offerings based on the site-specific location we are visiting. There is performance in our interaction and exchange – art through social engagement.

THERESA LOONG

Theresa Loong is an interactive media artist who creates intergenerational storytelling experiences focused on memory, identity, and immigration through the use of film, games and apps. Her documentary, “Every Day Is a Holiday,” showed on public television with support from the LMCC, ITVS and CPB. She was a consulting producer for AMC Networks on digital storytelling experiences surrounding The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad. Theresa led integrated media projects with the New York Times, Architecture for Humanity, and Food and Wine. She taught interactive technologies at NYU and exhibited at the Teriennale di Milano and Círculo de Bellas Artes. She is currently developing an interactive piece with community organizations called “Bought/Broken.” Theresa works at Local Projects, an experience design studio based in New York. She is chairperson of the board of directors of The FilmShop.

LAURA NOVA

Laura Nova is an interdisciplinary artist who creates sculpture, video, sound, performance and installation focused on the dynamics of human interaction using consumption, cardio, and comedy. Her interactive video installation “On the Spot” was included in the Independent Curators International exhibition Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art and “Limited Run” at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT for which she received a National Performance Network Grant. Her public artwork “Crescendo,” an automated praise-singing machine, received the Fund for Creative Communities and the Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant. Exercising storytelling, subjective and collective memory and the body, “Moving Stories: a senior-led walking tour” is her latest project that pulls all of these elements together. Laura is an associate professor at Bloomfield College in the division of Creative Arts and Technology where she teaches expanded media and lives on the Lower East Side in New York City.